


Meet Me in Arcadia

by aeli_kindara



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cabeswater - Freeform, Call Down the Hawk Spoilers, College Student Adam Parrish, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Post-The Raven King, also: feelings, this is a CDTH sampler coda, with magic and fainting and a bit of a mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 19:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20879735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: “Ronan — go,” said Adam, in a low voice. “Justgo,and we’ll figure out the rest of this later. Don’t muck it up just because —”Just because you’re doomed before you even try.Ronan nodded tightly. Adam didn’t need him; Adam needed him. Both realities were too horrible to look in the eye.(In which Adam and Ronan deal with the situation that arises inCall Down the HawkChapter 8, and something's happened on the ley line.)





	Meet Me in Arcadia

**Author's Note:**

> This is something of a coda to the Call Down the Hawk sampler chapters Maggie posted in June. It picks up right where Ch8 of CDTH leaves off, so expect spoilers up to that point!
> 
> Title from _[Yoshi (A Pastoral)](https://the-end-of-art.tumblr.com/post/141236667430/and-i-will-devour-everythingthat-wants-to-harm)_ by Hannah Faith Notess.

### I.

There was no way they were going to clean the room before the relevant authority arrived.

Ronan knew this, and he knew Adam knew this, because Adam was nothing if not practical. “Paper towels,” Adam told Fletcher; “the bathroom — no, actually, the janitor’s closet will have stacks, and maybe a bucket —”

His voice was steady but higher than usual, climbing. His face looked white. Ronan’s hands were shaking; from adrenaline, from shame.

Fletcher looked overwhelmed, his round face gloriously blotchy. “I’ll go,” Ronan said; he could find a janitor’s closet. There might be more things they could use there; cleaning products. Look for the bottle marked _ Crab Gut B-Gone. _

The glob on the wall next to him was eating through the paint. It smoked unpleasantly.

Adam looked around with despair on his face, and twitched the covers of his bed, as if a neat corner might conceal the lumpiness of crab carcasses that lay beneath. Ronan took that as his cue, and brushed past Fletcher — this was difficult, as Fletcher still stood frozen just inside the doorway — and out into the hall. Behind him, as he broke into a run, he heard Adam say something else in a low, desperate voice. He couldn’t make out the words.

He could imagine them. If Harvard kicked Adam out —

God. _ Shit. _

Ronan slammed open the door of the janitor’s closet, skidding through it, but the resounding bang did nothing to comfort him. He ached with desperate energy. There were the paper towels; there, a bucket and cleaning products — he swept the whole shelf’s worth into his arms. Then he was tearing back down the hall — curious faces watched him from open doors — and back into Adam’s room.

Adam and Fletcher were using handfuls of Kleenex to sponge gingerly at the crab guts. On the bedside table, miraculously unmoved from where he’d left it the night before, Ronan’s phone buzzed.

He ignored it. He tore open the sleeve of towels instead, offering fistfuls each to Adam and Fletcher. He kept one for himself, grabbed a spray bottle at random, and aimed it at a quivering yellow mess. Were those _ eggs _ in there?

His phone buzzed again.

Whatever the spray bottle contained, it made the crab glop seethe and the maybe-eggs swell ominously. Ronan dropped the bottle and mopped up the whole mess as quickly as he could, twisting to lob the resulting toxic missile across the room and into the trash can.

He hoped the crab guts wouldn’t eat through plastic.

Adam was on one knee on the floor, wiping up the carnage by the bed. He had paper towels in one hand and Ronan’s phone in the other; there was a frown on his face, laid like plaster over the wretched panic. “It’s Declan,” he said. “Your appointments.”

His appointments_. _

Adam was looking at him. Fletcher was looking at him, too, as if he expected Ronan to say something, or maybe explode in a burst of shrapnel; Adam knew better. Ronan was not going to say anything. Ronan _ could _ not say anything, not when —

“Ronan — go,” said Adam, in a low voice. “Just _ go, _ and we’ll figure out the rest of this later. Don’t muck it up just because —”

_ Just because you’re doomed before you even try. _

Ronan nodded tightly. Adam didn’t need him; Adam needed him. Both realities were too horrible to look in the eye. He threw his remaining paper towels at Fletcher as he rose to his feet, and Adam’s friend blinked as a few fluttered loose around him, the half-hearted wings of some drab brown compostable bird. _ Adam’s friend, _ the one who Adam looked at when he said: _ help me. _

“Ronan,” said Adam, again.

Ronan turned. Adam was holding out his phone for him. His eyes were terrible; they said, _ please? _

Their fingers brushed when Ronan took it. Then he stumbled out of the room and into exile, down the creaking stairs and out into the chilly October air.

### II.

Adam Parrish was no stranger to imminent doom. He knew the way that it tightened at his vision, drawing in the edges of the world; he knew the way his heart raced and the way his mind raced faster. He knew the gut-drop like a missed step when there wasn’t an answer. No way out.

The proctor was coming, and he was _ fucked. _

He scrubbed at the floor hastily, methodically. Fletcher was working on the walls; the paint came away with the crab slime. Adam hadn’t laid down anything to protect his knees; his pajama pants would be ruined. Might be ruined. They were an unnecessary extravagance; he could live without another pair.

He could not live without several thousand dollars in damages.

Would they allow him to keep his place at the school? Harvard students had done worse than this, surely. Adam had limited experience with the most raucous of the campus parties, but he’d seen flip cup played in the soaring atria of historic mansions, glow-in-the-dark body paint smeared on antique wooden floors. Aglionby bros managed to destroy their dorm rooms all the time; Harvard couldn’t be that different. Students weren’t being kicked out over it every other week.

_ Because they have money, _ a voice hissed back in his head. _ Because they have fathers no one wants to offend. They won’t hesitate for a second to show you the door. And then everyone will see you for what you are. _

Adam knew that voice, and he knew not to trust it. But he couldn’t quite shut it off, either.

Focus on other things. What if they let him stay, contingent on paying for the damages? Work study was part of Adam’s financial aid package, but he could find a second job. For the last two months, he’d had _ time: _ time to sleep, time to study, time to play cards and attend parties and make friends. It was a luxury he’d dearly miss; he felt the thorns of that loss dragging at his insides. But he could do it. He’d done it before.

Would they let him pay it in installments?

Ronan might offer to pay. No, Ronan _ would _ offer to pay, and that tasted bitter in Adam’s mouth. Another voice in his head, one that bore a strong resemblance to Gansey, argued: _ Jesus, Adam, it’s his fault the room is fucked. At least let him cover the damages. _

But Gansey didn’t understand; Gansey’d never understood. Adam had destroyed a table full of figurines at the Gansey mansion, once, and none of them had ever mentioned it again. They’d sent him home with gifts, a car and a plant and a vest — _ that _ vest, on its hanger on the closet door, with a fleck of crab goo dribbling in slow motion down the front — and they’d felt bad about it. They’d wished they could do more.

It was generosity; it was kindness; he knew now it wasn’t pity. At least not in the way he’d always dreaded pity. But nothing changed the sting of it: that Adam would never be able to offer anyone the same kindness. That his generosity was limited to the reserves of his person, thinly stretched as they were.

How he wished he could tell Ronan: _ don’t worry about it. _ How he wished he could ease the knot of guilt that lay behind Ronan’s eyes.

Even his person was less than it had once been: just a boy in secondhand clothes. Once, strange leaves and vines had tangled in him. The rivers of a magical forest had run through his veins. _ I will be your hands, _ he’d told Cabeswater, _ I will be your eyes; _ but Cabeswater had died, sacrificed itself at Adam’s bidding. There was a new one, now, drawn from Ronan’s dreams, and it loved Adam, but it wasn’t _ one _ with him, not the way it had been before.

Once, Adam had been able to go with Ronan when he dreamed of Cabeswater — to shield Ronan from his own nightmares. He could still scry, but he could never quite scry himself into Ronan’s dreams.

A knock sounded on the door.

When he looked up, Fletcher was already opening it. Adam opened his mouth; the words _ wait, don’t _flew to his lips. But it was only Eliot who skidded in the doorway, nose red from the cold, and Gillian behind him. “Fletcher said you needed —” she started, and stopped short, swaying. “What the fuck?” she said.

“I, uh,” said Adam.

“There are crab legs on your floor,” Gillian observed.

Adam looked. There were; he’d missed those. He grabbed them up hastily and added them to the stinking pile in the trash can. Eliot said, “How did you get a motorcycle in here?”

“I — it’s a long story,” Adam said. He felt a little detached from his body, like he might start laughing hysterically without notice. He couldn’t tell if he was smiling improbably as he spoke. “I’ll try and explain, I just — do you think there’s any way we could hide the damage?” He could patch the walls himself, if he only had more time. Replace the bedsheets, fit a new pane for the window. Repair the furniture. That would be cheaper, surely, than paying for Harvard to do it.

None of it would matter if they kicked him out.

Fletcher pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll get the bedding from my room,” he offered, holding out his remaining towels to Gillian. When she didn’t take them, Eliot did. Fletcher’s room was on the floor two below Adam’s. He could make it, if the proctor was slow.

That left the window, and the walls. And the motorcycle.

Adam kept at his immediate task: de-sliming the room. Eliot came to join him. Adam and Fletcher had managed most of the major disaster zones, but there were little globs of the stuff everywhere: on the walls, the dresser, the mirror, even the ceiling. Adam climbed onto his desk to reach one of them, precarious, avoiding stepping on broken glass. 

Gillian stood watching. Gillian didn’t like to embark on any endeavor without a plan for _ winning_; this was unwinnable.

Frustration strangled Adam. “Gillian,” he said, a little more sharply than he intended. “Either help me, or —”

Gillian’s body spasmed like she’d suddenly remembered to inhabit it. He saw her eyes cast around the room. Then she took three long, purposeful steps toward the bed and reached to yank the torn and slimy covers free.

“Wait,” said Adam. “Don’t —”

It was too late. The comforter came free from where he’d tucked it in, and a nightmare of crab carcasses spilled across the floor.

They were inky black and ghoulish, the faces still staring even in death, gaping with teeth. Some were still whole, or nearly so, but others had been fragmented into shards of shell: an eye here, a snarling lip there. They looked like they might move on their own.

Eliot let out a little scream and took two steps back. Gillian stood absolutely frozen, the bundle of comforter in her hand, crabs in a pile around her feet.

Adam felt his lips part, but no sound came out.

He was so, so entirely fucked.

A knock sounded on the door. Not Fletcher’s knock; this one came twice, authoritative, followed by the proctor’s voice. It was effortlessly deep and male and annoyed at having lost its leisurely Saturday morning to freshman shenanigans. “Adam Parrish? Open the door.”

Adam could not open the door. Adam would not open the door.

“Parrish? I have a key. I’m coming in.”

There was no time to hide anything. No time to repair anything. And now it was worse, because his floor was littered with something that should not exist and yet did — with something supernatural. _ Magic_. Ronan. The Greywaren.

Colin Greenmantle had lived in this city, and been willing to kill to possess the Greywaren. Laumonier had lived in this city. Who was to say their associates weren’t still sniffing around? Who was to keep them from hearing of strange nightmare creatures in a Harvard dorm room, of a boy who came to town and summoned motorcycles out of his dreams?

Panic, a rising tide, reached his throat. Adam choked.

There was a rattle. The key in the lock.

_ Help me, _ thought Adam desperately, _ help me _ —

The door opened. A burst of pressure passed through the room. Invisible; a shock wave. For an instant, Adam saw two dorm rooms at once.

Then the proctor was standing there surveying them. The clean floor, the pristine walls, the unbroken glass.

Fletcher’s flag stood in a corner where it had always been.

There was no motorcycle, no stink of exhaust.

The beds were neat and made.

Adam smiled sheepishly at the proctor, still standing on his desk. His pulse thrummed within him. It thrummed outside him, in the air, in the earth beneath him; something had happened. Something had changed.

Gillian and Eliot gaped. Fletcher, appearing at the proctor’s elbow with an armful of linens, looked like he might faint dead away.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Adam said smoothly. “We didn’t realize how loud we’d been. We were just horsing around.”

### III.

Three quarters of a mile away, at precisely 10:13am, as he rounded the corner of the Granite Top Kitchen Island to get (as he had been instructed) a better view of the Cozy Breakfast Nook, Ronan Lynch felt his stomach pull outside itself.

It was a peculiar sensation, as if his body had taken a step forward and left everything that whirred and worked within it behind. He was abruptly very hungry, cripplingly hungry, as though he hadn’t eaten in days. _ Shit, I should ask if they have food in this Modern State-of-the-Art Kitchen, _ he thought, or meant to think, but he couldn’t find the words in his head. He couldn’t find the blood in his veins. His ears roared, and went dead, and white drew in around him.

Then he blinked, and observed that his view was of the Chic Contemporary Chandelier, and also of a corner of the Granite Top, upside down and unpolished, and also of Declan’s face, and also of Matthew’s. The woman from the rental company hovered at the margins, leaning into anxious view and out again. He was, Ronan surmised, on the floor.

He had not meant to be on the floor. When had he laid down the floor?

“Oh,” said Ronan, putting it together. “I fainted.”

It seemed like a strange thing for him to do. Ronan had never fainted before, not like this; he’d hurled himself into the dreamscape with Kavinsky’s pills, and he’d nearly been unmade once, fluttering between consciousness and death, but he’d never just — fainted.

Was this a terrible new consequence of the nightwash?

Had he dreamed? _ Oh God. _ Had he dreamed?

But he was not paralyzed; when he raised his hand to his face, it came willingly, and there was no black dampness running from his nose or his ears. Declan made a sound of annoyance and seized Ronan’s arm again; he was taking his pulse.

“Yes, you idiot,” he said. “Are you all right?”

That was a stupid question. Ronan was, constitutionally, never _ all right. _ But he didn’t seem any more _ all wrong _ than usual.

“I caught you,” Matthew said.

So he had. Ronan put together that the warm surface he was propped against was Matthew’s thighs. “Thank you,” he answered gravely.

“I can call EMS,” said the woman from the rental agency. “Should I call EMS?”

She was badly frightened; Ronan could see it. He was frightened also, but in an intrigued sort of way.

Judging by the smooth corporate smile on Declan’s face, he was the most frightened of them all.

“No. Thank you for showing us the Stainless Steel Appliances,” Ronan said. “But I don’t think this apartment is for me.”

### IV.

It was hours and hours later before Ronan was finally free.

They had two more apartments to view. Declan called and rescheduled one of them for the afternoon so he could take Ronan to a nearby café and watch him hawkishly until he’d finished his sandwich and consumed an entire smoothie. _ Loaded with antioxidants, _ Declan had said. _ Smoothies are _—

“Shut up,” Ronan told him, but not unkindly. He was aware of Matthew’s eyes on him. When he drank his smoothie, Matthew beamed.

“You’re a shithead,” Declan said, a reflex Ronan acknowledged with a tiny bow.

But all of that meant the apartment viewings dragged later in the day. After the second one, Declan flourished his phone and declared that, last-minute, he’d booked a fourth. Ronan pursed his lips and didn’t quite fight him about it.

He felt strangely old.

Adam didn’t call or text. Not Ronan, and not Declan, who was usually more likely to answer. Declan got along well with Adam. He seemed to have decided that, in Adam, Ronan had finally accepted something resembling a sensible influence.

As if Adam was sensible. As if Ronan could be influenced. As if he could change if he wanted to — he was old, old, older than the brownstones, older than the cobbled streets.

When at last they were done, Declan took them to yet another restaurant — the third of the day — and made Ronan eat again. They discussed the options. Ronan regretted, a little, dismissing the first one; it had been gleaming and fashionable in a way he knew Adam would like. Adam had always coveted things like that, beautiful and devoid of history.

“I liked the second one,” Matthew said. “It had a swimming pool.”

The second one had struck Ronan as cramped and airless. They all seemed cramped and airless. The second one, at least, had a balcony just large enough for a single small chair.

“The third one was available for purchase,” pointed out Declan. “A condominium is an investment opportunity —”

“Let’s do the second one,” Ronan interrupted.

Declan pursed his lips, and Ronan could see the arguments fighting to slip past them, but none of them prevailed.

They were trying hard, the Lynch brothers.

“Hell yes,” Matthew said.

At long last, by some common agreement, Declan drove the three of them back to Adam’s dorm. Ronan wasn’t sure if Declan had texted Adam while he wasn’t paying attention, or if this was merely what Declan had — reasonably — assumed to be the plan. Ronan himself had checked his phone, and found no messages. No _ I’m kicked out of Harvard, _ no _ it’s going to be okay, _ no _ could you pick up some drywall and a roll of joint tape. _

Ronan wasn’t about to tell Declan what had happened.

He would. Later. Maybe. Once he’d talked to Adam.

Maybe.

As the car drove off, he hovered at the curb. His thumb was hooked in his pocket, considering his phone. He was here, already; he could follow a student’s card-swipe through the door. He could walk upstairs to Adam’s room.

But Adam had handed him his phone. Adam had said _ please. _

Ronan pulled it out of his pocket, and called him.

Adam answered on the third ring. He sounded breathless, distracted; “Hey,” he said.

“Hey. I’m here.”

“Oh, good,” said Adam. “I’m in my room; come on up.”

_ You need to let me in. _ But a student was ascending the stairs, tapping his ID card on the reader. Ronan stepped up behind him and propped the door open with his foot, hesitating. He _ hated _ phones.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Declan’s words. Stupid question.

“Yes,” said Adam; “I think things are okay. But I need your help with something.”

\---

When Adam opened the door to his room, Ronan took two steps inside, and then stopped dead in his tracks.

Everything was as it had been. No crabs, no hoverboard, no motorcycle. No carnage, no damage to the walls or ceiling or floor.

Ronan’s dream had been wiped from existence.

Adam moved around him to shut the door. The room was empty of anyone else. There were three tarot cards laid out in the middle of the rug.

He said, without preamble, “Something’s happened on the ley line.”

A jolt of sick fear tugged Ronan’s gut. “Back home?”

“No; here. Somewhere near here. It’s still ours — it runs through Boston, you know.”

Ronan knew. Adam knew that he knew. But Adam was inside himself, thrumming with excited energy. “Ronan,” he said, urgent, “it was Cabeswater. I was panicking, and Cabeswater — fixed it. Protected me.”

Ronan blinked.

Adam’s bargain with Cabeswater was only one of the things that had pendulumed him between misery and elation, that last summer: it hadn’t come back. Like his family trailer, like Harvard, he was nothing without it; without it he was free. That bargain was everything of who Adam had been, and nothing of who he was going to be.

This Adam was jittering with possibility.

Adam’s panic had been Ronan’s fault.

He raised his eyebrows, skeptical. _ Are you sure? _

“It _ was,_” repeated Adam. “You think I don’t know how Cabeswater feels?”

“Cabeswater cleaned your room.”

Scorn saturated the words, but once they were out he couldn’t take them back. It didn’t seem to matter; Adam sailed on, talking fast. “It’s true it’s never done something like that before. It’s repelled immediate physical, or I guess also metaphysical, threats; the shingles, the demon, my dad at St. Agnes, but I think —”

“Wait,” said Ronan, “what?”

Adam drew up short.

He seemed to realize he’d said something he shouldn’t have; something in him deflated and he gave Ronan an awkward, sideways look. _ It was long ago, _ the look seemed to say. _ We don’t really need to talk about it. _

Ronan answered this with a cool _ I-will-kill-you-and-murder-your-pets-for-good-measure _ sort of a stare.

Adam sighed. “It’s not a big deal. My dad came to St. Agnes; Cabeswater repelled him. It manifested a thorn in the palm of his hand.”

In his palm. That meant Adam’s father’s hand had been raised. It meant he’d been close enough to strike.

Ronan had fantasized, often, about getting in his car and driving to the Parrish family trailer. He’d fantasized about all the things he’d yell until Robert Parrish came out into the driveway. Then he’d fantasized about taking a tire iron and beating Adam’s father to death.

It felt fitting. It was how Niall Lynch had died. One of their fathers, at least, deserved to bleed out in a pulp at the steps of his family home.

It wasn’t a fear of committing murder that stopped him. It wasn’t uncertainty that he could do it, either. Ronan had had cause to kill someone once before, and hadn’t done it — not even with Matthew’s life on the line. But that was Kavinsky, and this was Robert Parrish.

No, what stopped him was the knowledge that he’d destroy Adam if he did. That Adam was working too hard to be untouched by his father’s legacy for Ronan to dive in and start kicking it up.

If he’d been in Virginia, right now, he wasn’t sure he could have stopped himself.

“When?” he asked, instead, in a voice that grated and guttered like a botched gear shift.

“Before the trial.” Adam seemed to have sensed something of Ronan’s thoughts. He was looking at him now, properly, for the first time since he’d entered the room.

Ronan felt transparent. His useless feelings were nails and thumbtacks piling in his belly, jammed in his throat.

Adam said Ronan’s name, as if from a great distance. Then he was close, and putting a hand on the back of Ronan’s neck.

Ronan shuddered and went where the touch took him, and Adam pulled him in, just pulled him, so that they were swaying together, chest to chest and rib to rib.

Ronan buried his face in the warm skin of Adam’s neck. 

Sometimes, sitting in church, a traveling beam of stained-glass light would land on him. Sidestep its amorphous way across his thigh, or the crown of his head, and move on. Ronan always understood that these conjunctions could be predicted, if someone really tried — his seat in the pews, the height of the windows, longitude and latitude and time of day — but they felt like something mystical all the same. Colored panes of warmth; of benediction.

That was how it felt, every place Adam Parrish touched his skin.

Adam curled his hand at the back of Ronan’s neck, once, twice, slow. He kissed the muscle of his shoulder, then the place below his ear, and Ronan shivered again.

Then Adam drew back. “Will you help me find the place? Where the ley line — did something?”

It took a moment of blinking to return to the world of English syntax and grammar. Adam’s touch made him a wild bird, like Chainsaw with Ronan’s hand over her eyes: still and calm and trusting, her little heart racing with the wordless knowledge of flight.

Ronan frowned, and scraped through his gut for the words waiting there. “What did you tell Fletcher? About earlier?”

“Oh.” Adam smiled, a little like Matthew did when Ronan made a joke at his expense. “I — well, Gillian and Eliot were here too, and it didn’t seem right to leave Benjy out after that, so I told all of them. The truth, more or less. That I’m a — magician.”

Ronan looked at the cards on the floor. There it was, dead center: one arm raised, the symbols of his craft all around him.

He didn’t know a lot about tarot, but he knew that _ Magician _ was only one step away from _ Fool. _

“They saw the crabs too,” Adam admitted, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I couldn’t really stop them. I — told them I dreamed them.”

The world slowed. Ronan felt his pulse thud in amber.

“_You _ dreamed them,” he echoed.

Adam just nodded.

“Jesus _ fucking _Christ, Parrish,” Ronan said.

### V.

He was angry. He was unspeakably angry. He was angrier than he’d ever been in his life.

Ronan stared at Adam and his anger rushed around him, inutterable. It was wearing him smooth like a rock in a furious stream. 

Adam blinked at him, docile, and looked like no one Ronan knew or had ever known. He was every bit the stranger his clothing, his accent, his made-up family implied. He was unknowable. 

He was in danger, if any word ever slipped of the Harvard student who dreamed impossible creatures into life. That was _ Ronan’s _danger. It wasn’t Adam’s to take from him.

Was it really — was it all, this strange wondrous terrifying thing, this _ magic _ that was Ronan Lynch — was it so inconsequential? A mask to be picked up and discarded? Was that how Adam saw him, a party trick, a trivial thing?

There were no words in his body, nothing he could dream into being to show Adam how this felt. But he had to — he _ had to. _Adam was too important for lying to.

Adam was too important to die, a counterfeit dreamer in some ditch.

He needed words; he had none. Adam sighed. “Come on, Lynch. Will you drive while I scry?”

The dark boiling anger in Ronan’s blood had an outlet; it alchemized, _ flash, _ to a red-hot knife. “Depends,” he drawled. “We gonna end up at your dad’s house like last time? I hear he’s a real Southern gentleman these days.”

The barb landed; he saw it; but Adam didn’t flinch. “I hope not,” he said quietly, a weapon of his own, “because the thing I’m scrying for feels an awful lot like _ you_.”

\---

They drove.

Cambridge sprawled out around them, under the shitbox’s wheels. Fancy tea shops and five-sided intersections and laughing gaggles of eighteen-year-olds straight out of an admissions brochure. The late October sun slanted low through the trees, turning even the weary brown of the oaks into gold. The muddy Charles River gleamed.

It surprised Ronan, though it shouldn’t have, how quickly they left Harvard behind. Brownstones faded into strip malls and gas stations, straggling neighborhoods of houses with chipped paint, streets convulsed by frost heaves and potholes. He slammed the brakes to avoid murdering a kid sprinting after a soccer ball. The crosswalk paint was faded beyond recognition.

“Left,” said Adam, glassy beside him, eyes not seeing the kid at all.

Ronan felt suddenly, piercingly lonely. He bit down on the feeling and imagined stabbing the claw of some terror bird into his own eyeball.

_ No. _ He didn’t hate himself. Not anymore.

Adam’s directions led them down a street even more pock-marked than the rest — down toward the river. If there had ever been lanes, the weather-beaten asphalt had forgotten them long ago. A dog peered, then barked at them from inside a chain-link fence.

The road made an abrupt U-turn, dropping them down the last rise of riverbank, and ended.

Ronan cut the engine, and Adam blinked, slowly, into awareness. They were in a weedy, overgrown lot — cracked and patched asphalt, a square of concrete where a building might once have stood. One of those old gas stations or mechanic shops, maybe, from back before everyone figured out not to keep their carcinogens right next to their rivers.

Adam reached, dreamlike, for the handle of his door. It creaked appallingly as he slid out, but he shut it behind him gently, with barely a sound. Ronan watched through the windshield as he crossed the lot, stood for a moment at the weedy edge, then shouldered through the tall grass and into the trees beyond.

He stayed where he was for a moment. He felt as though he and the shitbox had grown together, somehow: two things of Adam’s, made for cursing and cajoling into function until the time came to move on.

Adam didn’t emerge from the trees. Ronan breathed out hard through his nose, wrestled his own door open, and closed it behind him with a satisfying bang.

The trail wasn’t hard to follow. Overgrown as it was, the dead grass flattened easily. Tangles of blackberries snagged at his jeans. A branch of burs was broken off, though, out of the way — fastidious Adam, protecting the investment of his clothes.

A carpenter bee buzzed past Ronan’s elbow, fat and shiny black-blue. It bumped into a leaf, then another, and pondered on.

Ronan followed.

Suddenly, the sound in his ears changed.

It was still the drone of the bee. But now there was another, somewhere — more than one of them. And they weren’t the only insects. A distant hum of grasshoppers, dry and implacable in the sun. A nearby scratching: _ ka-ty-did, ka-ty-did. _

Ronan stepped around a sycamore trunk, and saw Adam.

He was standing with his hands at his sides. All around him was the grove of trees — sycamores and cottonwoods, green still with summer, bent and drowsy but straggling toward the sun. Beyond them, an impression of parched grass. Dusty valley and distant mountains beyond.

Ronan knew this place. It _ was _ Adam’s father’s — the old trailer park. He was standing where the steps to his house should have been.

They weren’t there, though. Neither was the double-wide. The carpenter bee must have found another home.

No, the only remnants of Adam’s old life were the dusty trees and the monotonous insects and the pollen heavy in the air, and the carport: standing there alone at the edge of the shade.

It was not as it had been. None of Robert Parrish’s half-finished projects or his posters of topless, big-busted women. But the workbench was there, and the tools.

At the center of the carport, gleaming and silent, kickstand resting proudly on the concrete floor, was Ronan’s motorcycle.

“I,” said Adam; then, turning, faint wonder on his face: “Did you —?”

Ronan struggled for a moment to answer.

“Not on purpose,” he managed, finally. “I didn’t — I fainted, this morning. Declan’s been crawling up my ass about it all day.”

Adam’s gaze sharpened. “Nightwash?”

“None,” Ronan confirmed. But a part of him felt obscurely comforted that Adam had asked.

“It’s —” started Adam, then frowned, eyebrows pinching. “Hang on. I —”

He didn’t finish the sentence, just lapsed into silent concentration. Ronan shifted, impatient, from foot to foot. Then Adam lifted his chin and said, slowly, “_Salvete, amicae veneratae. Scitisne nos?_”

It took Ronan a moment to parse the Latin. Then he snorted. “Dude. ‘Revered friends’?”

But Adam flapped a hand at him. And the trees were rustling; they were turning, slowly, their half-torpid attention focusing incrementally on the two boys in their midst.

Adam breathed in, out, two sharp gusts. Then he laughed, high and wild and happy, and raised one hand.

The trees trembled again. And then they shuddered, and pulsed, and it was music: Ronan’s music, blaring techno, the roar of a motor, the fierce high cadence of a fiddle on a reel. “It’s _ Cabeswater,_” said Adam, through the sound, “I must have — pulled a piece to me, when I asked for help. Along the ley line. It couldn’t reach, so it manifested here.”

Ronan moved through the music. He stepped under the carport roof to inspect the motorcycle: it was as he’d dreamed it. “You could use this. Not deal with that thing anymore, if you don’t want to,” meaning the cobbled-together simulacrum of a car in the parking lot behind them.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, stepping to follow him.

There was a moment when he hesitated, though, at the concrete threshold. His sneaker toed the lip of it: free of its oil stains, its past.

This place had been Adam’s refuge, Ronan knew. His refuge and his exile.

He felt suddenly furious again. Furious or miserable, which for Ronan was the same thing; he felt his shoulders inch high and weapon-like. “You don’t have to, you know.”

Surprise crossed Adam’s face. The next moment, he stepped smoothly under the carport roof, as though he’d never hesitated at all. “I like it, though,” he said, moving to inspect the bike. He tested the ignition switch: _ YES/NO. _ The engine hummed to life, then obligingly quieted again. “Does it take gasoline?”

“I don’t,” said Ronan, distracted; “I think so. Parrish. Not that.”

The hair at the back of Adam’s neck was just a little sweaty; it stuck to his skin. Ronan loved him hopelessly.

“You don’t have to — any of it.” His voice was a crow’s beak in his throat, all hard edges. “You can ditch whatever you’ve gotta ditch, man. Your dad, or Henrietta, or —” _ Or me. _

He said it.

“Or me.”

Adam’s eyes came up. They were wide and startled and sepia-toned like the rest of him; abruptly, the tree-music died.

“What?”

Ronan’s skin was too big for him. He moved restlessly inside it. “_Me. _ Man, you can’t have not thought about it. I come up for a day and you’re pulling — Crapswater here out of nowhere, you’re —”

“_Ronan,_” said Adam, and Ronan shut his mouth.

Around them, the symphony of insects droned on, unfazed. There might be clouds gathering somewhere in the distant dream-valley, Ronan thought; there was an impression of building blue shadows, a faint scent of the promise of rain. It wasn’t so bad here — not like this. Not with the sagging prison of the double-wide wiped from existence; not with the green, rustling cottonwoods, and the buzzy grasshopper-song, and a distant frog croaking experimentally into the dying afternoon.

Back at home, Ronan had dreamed and dreamed and built every last bit of his pain into something beautiful. But Adam’s pain defied him; Adam’s pain was ugly, and Adam was dead set on keeping it ugly. Keeping it out of sight.

Who the hell was Ronan to tell him otherwise?

“You know when I was a kid,” said Adam, “I used to dream about someone finding out.”

Ronan’s head turned, a swivel on a string.

“Someone would realize, or figure it out, or — see something. And then they’d know, and they’d be so full of righteous fury on my behalf that they’d — _ kill _ him.”

The arc of a fist through the porch light in Ronan’s rearview mirror. The knowledge, as if for the first time: Adam could be broken. Adam could be lost.

“And then I got older, and I realized — everyone knows. They come to know so slowly that they never see you apart from what — what’s happening, and they can ask questions but it doesn’t make it better, they can try and move you to foster care but that doesn’t make it better.” Ronan jolted, and Adam gave him a lopsided smile. “I had a teacher in — fourth grade, I think. I lied to her. Told her it never happened.”

“_I’ll _ kill him.” The words ground their way up Ronan’s throat, foreign objects. He spat them out whole. “The minute you fucking ask.”

“Don’t.” Adam’s voice sounded strange, small, like he’d only just now realized that Ronan _ meant _ it. “I don’t want that.”

Ronan sighed, and leaned back against the workbench. He hunched his shoulders and scuffed a foot on the concrete floor. “Yeah. I know.”

### VI.

They made the drive back in silence, the shitbox rattling magnanimously with Adam back behind its wheel. He’d taken the bike for a spin, up the hill and back again, doing donuts in the parking lot; coming to a halt with his eyes laughing and his hair tousled and wild. Ronan had taken a turn of his own — he’d managed several seconds of a wheelie — but they’d both decided the bike was too odd to leave parked at a Harvard curbside. It was best kept out of sight in the little grove.

Ronan hadn’t called it Crapswater again. Adam hadn’t asked him not to, but it still felt somehow profane.

The sun was almost gone in the real world, streetlights winking on around them as they drove. Jack-o-lanterns lit up some of the porches already; there were cobwebs strung in hedges, ghosts adorning the lawns. They didn’t look much like Noah, but then, most people had never known a real ghost. Or never known that they’d known.

They were turning down Concord Avenue when Ronan’s phone buzzed. He had it in his hands, for no reason except to fidget; when he turned the screen to look at it, Adam looked over at him like he’d grown an extra head and nearly rear-ended the car in front of him.

“It’s from Declan,” said Ronan. “I got the apartment.”

He didn’t look directly at Adam. He could see his posture unsettling and reassembling itself, the clench of his jaw. The light turned green, and Adam pressed the gas; the shitbox _ thunked _ joyously over a manhole.

“I’ll tell them the truth,” said Adam, sliding into the left-turn lane. “Fletcher and Gillian and — I’ll tell them I’ve been lying about my dad.”

Something hot and uncomfortable prickled at the back of Ronan’s neck. “Man, you don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

He said it firmly, like he was willing himself to believe it. But he glanced at Ronan as he did, and it looked like a question. Like a: _ Please — will you stay? _

Ronan raised an eyebrow at him. Slowly, Adam smiled.

The ground thundered beneath them; the metro, or the T or whatever they called it here. The shitbox’s seats vibrated, precarious on their mounts.

“Place has a fucking pool,” Ronan said, through his rattling teeth. “Matthew’s obsessed with it.”

The nightwash might be a problem. So might the new voice in his head — the second dreamer. But then, with an island of dream-magic nearby to visit any time he needed it — maybe it would be fine. Maybe he could do this after all.

They pulled even with Adam’s parking space. Some dick in a Kia wagon had his tires half over the line; Adam sighed. Ronan examined the truncated gap along the curb. Could fit a bike in here no problem.

Adam was looking at the Kia with an odd sort of unfocus in his eyes. His fingers fidgeted on the steering wheel.

Ronan wasn’t quite sure what bit of it changed. If the Kia nudged forward, or the curb stretched, or the Hondayota shrunk; maybe a bit of all three. But Adam was parallel parking with the smoothness of practice. The nose of his hood slid in neatly at the Kia’s heels.

Then Adam was laughing, and Ronan was laughing. The giddy swell of adventure fizzed at his chest. Something was waiting for him here; he just had to find out what.

A new Cabeswater. Magic in Adam’s hands again. Dreams of a voice Ronan didn’t understand. _ It was starting. _

He smiled wide, baring his teeth, and thought: _ Let it come. _

**Author's Note:**

> _Meet me in arcadia  
the forest where I was born  
under trees taller  
than you can believe  
and believe their invisible boughs  
map the world for us  
and believe their fruit  
will sustain us forever..._
> 
> _And though I cannot consume  
your ghosts or enter the ruined  
palaces of your memory  
beloved I will wait for you  
always in the roadless shade._
> 
> \- Hannah Faith Notess, [Yoshi (A Pastoral)](https://the-end-of-art.tumblr.com/post/141236667430/and-i-will-devour-everythingthat-wants-to-harm)
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! <3


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